Johnson Controls Inc. has joined a partnership to establish a battery and energy storage research center southwest of Chicago, which the U.S. Department of Energy will award up to $120 million over five years, according to an announcement Friday.

Argonne National Laboratory will lead the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research to be built at Argonne’s suburban Chicago campus. Other partners include several Illinois universities, the University of Michigan, Dow Chemical Co., Applied Materials Inc. and Clean Energy Trust.

Argonne, perhaps best known for developing the battery technology used in the Chevrolet Volt, is home to more than 1,250 scientists and engineers and is managed by UChicago Argonne LLC.

Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI) is a Glendale-based manufacturer of automotive interior systems and batteries and provider of facility management systems and services.

The initiative will combine efforts at several independent research programs into a larger, coordinated effort, the Energy Department said.

“This is a partnership between world-leading scientists and world-leading companies, committed to ensuring that the advanced battery technologies the world needs will be invented and built right here in America,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in a press release. “Based on the tremendous advances that have been made in the past few years, there are very good reasons to believe that advanced battery technologies can and will play an increasingly valuable role in strengthening America’s energy and economic security by reducing our oil dependence, upgrading our aging power grid and allowing us to take greater advantage of intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.”

Illinois is providing $5 million to help build the center’s facility. Gov. Pat Quinn will also seek another $30 million in state dollars for future capital funding for the building, according to a press release.

The center is the fourth energy innovation hub established by the Energy Department since 2010. Other such initiatives include modeling and simulation of nuclear reactors, achieving improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings and developing fuels from sunlight.Jeff Engel is The Business Journal’s reporter covering the manufacturing industry and technology.

Kelvin Doe’s neighborhood in Sierra Leone has power lines, but they seldom deliver electricity. So, the 16-year-old whiz kid built his own battery out of acid, soda, and metal parts scavenged from trash bins that he now uses to light up area homes and help him work on his own inventions.

Among other gadgets to his credit are a homemade radio transmitter, plus a generator to power it, that he uses to run his own community radio station under the handle DJ Focus.

“People normally call me DJ Focus in my community because I believe if you focus you can do invention perfectly,” he said in a video about the whiz kid produced by @radical.media for the THNKR YouTube channel.

Doe’s engineering prowess was noticed by David Monina Sengeh, a graduate student MIT Media Lab, during a summer innovation camp called Innovate Salone that he runs in Sierra Leone. Sengeh arranged for Doe to visit the top-flight engineering school this fall.

“It’s an opportunity for him to create the future that he wants to live in,” Sengeh said in the video. Check it out below to learn more about Doe’s inspirational story and his inventions.